Month: November 2017

But even ignoring the potential spam, the commission said it didn’t really care about the public’s opinion on net neutrality unless it was phrased in unique legal terms. The vast majority of the 22 million comments were form letters, the official said, and unless those letters introduced new facts into the record or made serious legal arguments, they didn’t have much bearing on the decision. The commission didn’t care about comments that were only stating opinion.

…this isn’t an open vote. It’s a deliberative process that weighs a lot of different factors to create policy that balances the interests of many stakeholders. But it still feels brazen hearing the commission staff repeatedly discount Americans’ preference for consumer protections, simply because they aren’t phrased in legal terms.

[So in order to make my point I needed to hire a lawyer to make the argument “This sucks for everyone but the giant ISPs” and write it in legalese? And also, the argument that this is a return to how it was in the past is wrong on two counts. One, they were regulated, and I think fairly strongly in the Clinton era, but further—times have changed.

The “internet” is a much as service as other utilities. In fact more so. You can choose to generate your own power in a number of ways. And you can choose to buy a property with a well, or other water sources and not be connected to the utilities. You can tank in ng or propane. But you can’t enjoy the Internet as we know it today without everyone playing fairly. And the ex-Verizon lawyer who is the current Chair of the FCC can’t possibly fail to see that the companies that offer this utility need to be treated like utilities, if not the mother of all utilities. And the “nyah. nyah. we can’t hear you unless you write in legalize” stuff is just galling.]